Lit Hub Daily: October 31, 2025
THE BEST OF THE LITERARY INTERNET
TODAY: It’s Halloween!
- Happy Halloween from the Lit Hub Podcast! Drew Broussard reads you “The Cask of Amontillado” as a treat. | Lit Hub Radio
- Jess deCourcy Hinds traces the 80-year evolution of the iconic Wednesday Addams. | Lit Hub Film
- Catherine Newman finds some humor in the unexpected: “Anything catching on fire and crashing through the chimney into the living room is funny—but it’s really funny if it’s raccoons.” | Lit Hub Craft
- Nick Ripatrazone reads Anne Sexton’s “imperfect and thorny” rejected horror stories. | Lit Hub Criticism
- When it comes to Jack the Ripper, how do we separate fact from fiction? On Arthur Conan Doyle, the infamous serial killer, and the nuances of criminal profiling. | Lit Hub History
- Daria Lavelle meditates on the bond between food and our memories of the dead: “Food is personal and also universal. It’s ephemeral and meant to be consumed. It’s something to share, and to pass down.” | Lit Hub Food
- “The zombie is a spiritual vessel for unspeakable anguish. A repository of hopelessness. No peace even in death.” On ants, parasitic mushrooms, and how the origin of zombies relates to historical anti-Blackness. | Lit Hub History
- John Blair considers the numerous cultures that hold space for when the dead walk among us. | Lit Hub History
- Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket, Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, Gish Jen’s Bad Bad Girl, and Susan Orlean’s Joyride all feature among October’s best reviewed books. | Book Marks
- Yossi Yovel explores the habitats of the blood-sucking (but not so fiendish) vampire bats. | Lit Hub Nature
- Roger Luckhurst examines a human history of burial rituals and how we honor the dead. | Lit Hub Science
- “George Dunn sat in his cubicle at Peapod Press, a space small enough that if he stretched his long arms, he could nearly touch the fabric walls on either side.” Read from R.L. Maizes’ new novel, A Complete Fiction. | Lit Hub Fiction
- Adela Pinch considers Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, “a tour de force of child narration.” | Public Books
- Here’s something that should make authors feel better about their sparsely-attended readings: Elisabeth Bumiller reports on Karine Jean-Pierre’s nightmare of a book tour. | The New York Times
- Travis Alexander revisits Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, “an allegory about the fellow-traveling ideologies of liberalism and progressivism.” | Los Angeles Review of Books
- Miranda Seymour explores the origins of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. | New York Review of Books
- Donald Quist considers Stone of Hope, (mis)representations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and standing in the shadow of a legacy. | AGNI
- What did medieval scribes need to fear? The trickster demon, Tutivillus. | JSTOR Daily
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